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Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s Forceful Envoy, Dies

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the Reagan administration’s first United Nations ambassador and a beacon of neoconservative thought who helped guide American military, diplomatic and covert action from 1981 to 1985, died Thursday at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 80.

Her death was announced yesterday by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she was a senior fellow. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her personal assistant, Tammy Jagyur.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was the first American woman to serve as United Nations ambassador. She was the only woman, and the only Democrat, in President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council. No woman had ever been so close to the center of presidential power without actually residing in the White House.

“When she put her feet under the desk of the Oval Office, the president listened,” said William P. Clark Jr., Mr. Reagan’s national security adviser during 1982 and 1983. “And he usually agreed with her.”

President Reagan brought her into his innermost foreign policy circle, the National Security Planning Group. There she weighed the risks and rewards of clandestine warfare in Central America, covert operations against Libya, the disastrous deployment of American marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada and support for rebel forces in Afghanistan.

Her public diplomacy made her a national political figure. She was a star performer at the 1984 Republican national convention, deriding the Democrats as the “blame America first” party.

She changed her political affiliation after leaving the Reagan administration and thought hard about seeking the Republican nomination for president.

“So many people talked to me about it so much that they finally persuaded me to consider it,” she said in October 1987. But she decided against it, fearing she would split the conservative vote and help elect Vice President George H. W. Bush. Though he won, she thought him too moderate to inherit the Reagan legacy.

Fifteen years later, in March 2003, President Bush recalled Ambassador Kirkpatrick to active duty and sent her to Geneva, said Alan Gerson, who had served as her general counsel at the United Nations. The secret mission, previously undisclosed, was to head off a diplomatic uprising against the imminent war against Iraq. Arab ministers wanted to condemn it as an act of aggression.

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Jeane J. Kirkpatrick representing the U.S. at the United Nations Security Council in 1984.Credit
Joel Landau/Associated Press

“The marching orders we received were to argue that pre-emptive war is legitimate,” Mr. Gerson said. “She said: ‘No one will buy it. If that’s the position, count me out.’ ”

Instead, she argued that the attack was justified by Saddam Hussein’s violations of United Nations resolutions dating from the 1991 war against Iraq. The foreign ministers found her position convincing and their resolve against the war faded, Mr. Gerson said.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was a political science professor with no diplomatic experience when she arrived at the United Nations in February 1981. Her mission was to wage rhetorical warfare against Moscow and its allies. She sought to restore the international standing of the United States after its defeat in Vietnam and the captivity of Americans in Iran.

Her high-profile performance at the United Nations made her President Reagan’s favorite envoy. “You’re taking off that big sign that we used to wear that said, ‘Kick Me,’ ” the president told her. He admired her strong diplomatic stands and her undiplomatic language. In a letter to 40 third world ambassadors in October 1981, for example, she accused them of spreading “base lies” and making “malicious attacks upon the good name of the United States.”

When nations opposed American foreign policy, she sent their voting records to Congress. The threat was tacit but clear: to stand against the United States meant to risk losing its foreign aid. Her deputy at the United Nations, Kenneth L. Adelman, said she enjoyed such close combat.

“We were like Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” he said.

Said She Hated U.N. Job

She professed to detest the United Nations. She compared it to “death and taxes.” But she endured it for four years.

At the United Nations, she defended Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. She argued for El Salvador’s right-wing junta and against Nicaragua’s left-wing ruling council, the Sandinistas.

In private, she supported American efforts to sustain the contras, the rebel group that tried to overthrow the Sandinistas with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. She was a crucial participant in a March 1981 National Security Planning Group meeting that produced a $19 million covert action plan to make the contras a fighting force.

She was part of a national security team that was often at war with itself. Her relationship with Mr. Reagan’s first secretary of state, the four-star general Alexander M. Haig Jr., “started off bad and got worse over time,” Mr. Adelman said in an oral history of the Reagan years. She had something Mr. Haig found that he lacked: the president’s ear.

Ms. Kirkpatrick first entered Mr. Reagan’s inner circle on the strength of a 10,000-word article she published in the neoconservative magazine Commentary in November 1979. The article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” drew a bright line between right-wing pro-American governments and left-wing anti-American ones.

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Jeane J. Kirkpatrick testified on Capitol Hill with Zbigniew Brezinski, the former national security adviser, in 1997.Credit
Joyce Naltchayan/AFP--Getty Images

“Traditional authoritarian governments,” she argued, “are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.” She said it was an historic mistake for the United States to have shied away from dictators like the Somozas in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran. If they served American interests, she asserted, they were defensible.

Mr. Reagan read the article closely. Richard V. Allen, who later became the first of his six national security advisers, introduced him to Ms. Kirkpatrick. They met at a February 1980 dinner party given by George F. Will, the syndicated columnist.

She recalled that she wondered aloud how she, a Democrat all her life, could join his team. Mr. Reagan confided, “I was a Democrat once, you know.” He won her over. After his election a year later, Ms. Kirkpatrick became the United Nations ambassador and “Dictatorships and Double Standards” became an important part of the foreign policy of the United States.

At the United Nations, Ms. Kirkpatrick was the target of barbs and backstabbing. Sometimes she was aware of the source, sometimes not.

She knew she was “a kind of special target for the Soviets — disinformation target,” she said at a 2003 foreign policy roundtable convened by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. In 1982, the K.G.B. forged a letter to discredit her and fobbed it off on the Washington correspondent for The New Statesman, a leftist British weekly, which reprinted it. The phony letter was a note of “best regards and gratitude” from the intelligence chief of the apartheid South African government.

“But I felt there was as much disinformation aimed at me from inside our own government, frankly, as from the Soviet Union,” Ms. Kirkpatrick said. “That’s a shocking thing to say, but it is no exaggeration.”

Role as Adviser Blocked

In 1983, Ms. Kirkpatrick was a strong candidate to become President Reagan’s third national security adviser. She had support from the director of central intelligence, William J. Casey, and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. But her new boss, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, opposed her.

“I respected her intelligence, but she was not well suited to the job,” Mr. Shultz wrote. “Her strength was in her capacity for passionate advocacy,” and the post, he added, demanded a “dispassionate broker.”

Ms. Kirkpatrick was at the June 1984 National Security Planning Group meeting that began the secret initiative that later became known as the Iran-contra affair. Congress had cut off funds for the contras. Mr. Casey wanted to obtain money from foreign countries in defiance of the ban.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was in favor. “We should make the maximum effort to find the money,” she said. Mr. Shultz was opposed. “It is an impeachable offense,” he said. President Reagan warned that if the story leaked, “we’ll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House.”

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Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press" in June 2003.Credit
Alex Wong/Associated Press

Secret Arms Sales Exposed

Over the next two years, millions skimmed from secret arms sales to Iran went to the contras. The story did leak, as Mr. Reagan feared, and his administration was shaken by Congressional investigations and criminal charges. Robert C. McFarlane, who had won the national security slot over Ms. Kirkpatrick, pleaded guilty to misinforming Congress.

Mr. McFarlane said he should have stood up against the secret initiative to support the contras. But “if I’d done that,” he said, “Bill Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger would have said I was some kind of commie.”

By then Ms. Kirkpatrick had left the government. She stuck to a vow to leave the United Nations at the end of Mr. Reagan’s first term and resigned in April 1985. She was succeeded by Vernon A. Walters, a former deputy director of central intelligence. The next year, as the Iran-contra story began unfolding, Mr. Casey urged the president to make her secretary of state, but Mr. Reagan rejected the idea.

Ms. Kirkpatrick spent the rest of her career commenting on policy instead of making it. She remained among the most highly regarded members of the Republican establishment, and her voice remained one of the strongest echoes of the Reagan era.

Jeane Duane Jordan was born on Nov. 19, 1926, in Duncan, Okla., about 160 miles northwest of Dallas, the daughter of Welcher F. and Leona Jordan. Her father was an oil wildcatter who moved from town to town searching for a gusher that he never hit.

She attended Stephens College in Missouri for two years, then moved to New York, where she earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in 1948 and a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1950. She went to Washington as a research analyst at the Intelligence and Research Bureau of the State Department, where she met her future husband, Evron Kirkpatrick. Fifteen years her senior, he was a veteran of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, and he soon became the head of the American Political Science Association. They married in 1955 and had three sons — Douglas Jordan, John Evron and Stuart Alan. Douglas died earlier this year. The other sons and five grandchildren survive her. Mr. Kirkpatrick died in 1995.

In 1967, before completing her doctoral dissertation, she was appointed associate professor at Georgetown University. The next year, she earned a doctorate in political science at Columbia University. Georgetown made her a full professor in 1973 and gave her the endowed Leavey Chair five years later.

Ms. Kirkpatrick supported Jimmy Carter in 1976 and came close to being chosen for an ambassadorship in his administration. But she had become deeply disenchanted with her party.

Swept In With 50 Others

She joined the vanguard of the neoconservative movement, the Committee on the Present Danger, which warned throughout the late 1970s of a disastrous downturn in every aspect of American strength, from nuclear warheads to national image. When Mr. Reagan came to office in 1981, 51 of the committee’s members won positions of significant power in his administration.

Power, Ms. Kirkpatrick said in a 1996 interview, is based not merely on guns or money but on the strength of personal conviction.

“We were concerned about the weakening of Western will,” she said. “We advocated rebuilding Western strength, and we did that with Ronald Reagan, if I may say so.”

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